The present invention relates to a printer device and, more particularly, to an outline font developing technique in the printer device.
As a method of developing an outline font, the following method is known. That is, outline font data of a character "I" shown in FIG. 2A is repetitively analyzed along an x-axis direction every dot-scan line, intermediate data having information representing the presence/absence of an edge line and information representing a position x of the edge line is formed by the analysis result to be stored. On the basis of the stored intermediate data, as shown in FIG. 2B, the character "I" is developed in a bit map memory.
In a conventional method of developing an outline font, as shown in FIG. 4, a one-character memory area for storing intermediate data for one character is assured (step S31), intermediate data obtained by sequentially analyzing outline font data along the x-axis direction every dot-scan line as described above are formed for all scan lines of one character (step S32), and the intermediate data are stored in the assured memory area.
Thereafter, on the basis of the intermediate data, for all the scan lines, which are stored in the memory area assured in advance in step S31, one character is developed and drawn in the bit map memory (step S33). Upon completion of drawing one character in the bit map memory, the assured memory area is released (step S34).
In the conventional method of developing an outline font, after all outline font data for one character are converted into intermediate data and stored, the character is drawn in a bit map memory. For this reason, a large amount of memory is required for developing the outline font.
In addition, since a memory amount required for developing the outline font is increased proportionally to the number of scan lines, i.e., the size of a character, the memory amount is not disadvantageously constant.